


Golden Age

by Scratch_Pad



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Golden Age Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22284196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scratch_Pad/pseuds/Scratch_Pad
Summary: In the 1930s, a rash of romances swept through the great detectives of the Golden Age of Mystery. A Phryne and Jack Come-After-Me fic.
Relationships: Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson
Comments: 76
Kudos: 94





	1. Lord Peter Views The Body

**Author's Note:**

> A smattering of introductory caveats:
> 
> -I have a Year's Resolution to overcome my paralysing perfectionism, readers of this fic will be the victims.  
> \- there will be footnotes, there are always footnotes.  
> \- the opening of this fic relies on what would seem a somewhat improbable coincidence; I can support it however by Primary Sources in the footnotes.

> _Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey made his first appearance in_ Whose Body? _in 1923, making him one of the earliest of the Golden Age detectives. Like Phryne Fisher he was an ultra-confident, wealthy, charming, high-living extrovert, a lover of fast cars and the opposite sex, who solved mysteries out of a sense of compassion, justice, and fun. Also like Phryne he combined an improbable array of talents (world-class cricketer and athlete, excellent classical pianist, first-rate scholar, fluent in multiple languages, etc etc) with a traumatic past, having been severely shell-shocked in 1918. The trilogy (_ Strong Poison, Have His Carcasse, Gaudy Night _) in which he meets and, after a long courtship, marries mystery novelist Harriet Vane was one of the first attempts at character development in a detective story; it's still a must read for anyone who enjoys clever mysteries, thinkie romance, and copious literary quotations. The BBC series with Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter is by far the best of the modern Golden Age Mystery TV adaptions._

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single detective in possession of popular success, must be in want of a marriage plot.

However little known the feelings or views of such a detective might be, this fact is so fixed in the minds of the reading public, that the bestowal by kindly providence of a perfect partner, fearsome obstacles on the course to true love, and an ending of domestic bliss, is considered the rightful property of the detective’s devoted followers.

“My dear Miss Fisher,” said Lord Peter Wimsey to that lady, his old friend for a good decade or so. “What on earth have you been doin’ with yourself, vanishing off to the Antipodes for all this time?”

He arranged himself expectantly on his Chesterfield, draping a long white hand along its velvet back. “We had all quite decided you had been devoured by Tasmanian Devils while exploring trackless jungles, or perhaps joined a transcendental nunnery in Tibet.”

“Hardly likely!” The Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher, curled elegantly on the other end of sofa, smiled that bewitching but unaffected smile for which she was so well-known. “Actually, I’ve been having a bit of fun in your line, Peter.”

“And which line is that? Incunabulae? Urban architecture? Cricket?”

She rolled her eyes, laughing. “Murders, darling, murders! I ought to have taken this up years ago. I haven’t had so much fun since twenty-four.”

“Criminal detection!” exclaimed Peter, delighted. “That most recherché and addictin’ of gentleman’s—or gentlewoman’s!—hobbies. Now that does suit you.”

“Profession, Peter, not hobby!” Miss Fisher corrected, a little sharply. She opened a little jewelled purse and produced a white card, handing it over to Wimsey from her side of the sofa.

As the sofa was a very large one, the two aristocratic detectives had to reach across some distance. In former years, when they had lain together very pleasantly upon those silk cushions, they had not taken separate ends. And yet neither made a move to close the gap.

Peter examined the card through the monocle screwed to his right eye. “‘The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher, Lady Detective’. I do beg your pardon, this does look very official. Not as lucrative as your some of your other work, I imagine, but much more in your line of derrin’-do. I could never quite picture you doing nothing but broodin’ over a ticker-tape machine.”

“The stock market is in the middle of becoming quite exciting enough even for me, and then some,” Miss Fisher said grimly. “I hope you’ve taken care, Peter.”

“My treasures upon earth, at least, are laid up from moth and rust and stock market crashes. Which is more than I can say for many a poor beggar of my acquaintance right now.” He eyed her shrewdly. “ Though I understand from Freddie Arbuthnot that those with cash capital, an appetite for risk, and a strong nerve will make, if you’ll pardon a professional allusion, an absolute killing.”

Miss Fisher merely smiled demurely.

“But let us return to more pleasant subjects—” Peter poured out another cocktail from the crystal jug his manservant had left them, before gliding discretely out. “Murder most foul, ‘orrible murder, in the secret places doth he murder! Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out! I must hear absolutely every detail of your cases. Given your exquisite taste in all the good things of life, your murders must be rare things indeed.”

Miss Fisher obligingly regaled him with tales of poisoned bookbindings and tampered guillotines, trumpet-mute blow-darts and deadly spiders; of the locked room and the seemingly innocuous clue; of her brilliance in surprising confessions out of cunning criminals by even more cunning traps. Peter made a most excellent audience.

“And do you have a nice little police Inspector to torment with your superior genius at crime-solving? Is he a narrow-minded old Lestrade, gnashin’ his teeth at your unorthodox methods and flouting of the law? Or a humble, plodding public servant, agog in admiration at your insights? I dare not hope you have as discerning an official as my dear Inspector Parker.”

Phryne smiled faintly and began to examine the construction of the tassels of a silk pillow with close attention. “Oh, my Inspector is...well, he’s...he’s quite a good detective himself actually. Almost as clever as I am, in fact. He’s more methodical of course. Careful. He’s always complaining that I take too many risks. But that’s because he cares so much about...about keeping people safe. About always doing the right thing. Noble, I suppose you might call him, it’s such an old-fashioned word, but he’s an old-fashioned sort of man. Although he has been trying to be more modern...”

She trailed off and focused her attention on the tassels.

Peter stared at her with raised eyebrows. “My word! Now I’m longin’ to meet this Wonder-Man.”

“Well, you’re in luck Peter, as you always are. He’s…coming to London as it happens.”

There was a lengthy pause.

“In fact,” she continued, in a rather high voice, “He’s coming after me.”

Lord Peter arched an eyebrow. “Coming after you with a warrant? Or...?”

Miss Fisher was most uncharacteristically silent. She couldn't possibly be _blushing?_

“Oho!” Peter crowed, astounded. “Are congratulations in order at last? Wonders never cease! Are we next to expect rains of fishes, stars starting from their spheres, and other cataclysmic portents? My dear Phryne, may I wish you—“

“Stop right there, Peter!” she cut off his ebullience with sudden irritation. “I didn’t expect such bloody conventional thinking from you. You know I don’t believe in marriage.” She jerked to her feet and strode agitatedly across the room, wrapping her arms around her chest.

“I beg your pardon,” Peter said politely. “Shouldn’t have assumed.”

She strode over to the window to look out at the cheerful traffic of Piccadilly, a troubled expression on her singularly beautiful face. 

Peter felt a stirring of unease. “By 'coming after you', do you mean...if this man is annoying you, Fisher, you need only say the word--"

She swung around to stare at him, then laughed rather wildly. “Now Peter you _have_ got the wrong end of the stick. The idea of Jack forcing his attentions on anyone! It took almost two years to get him to kiss me just once...”

“You _kissed_ him _once?_ ”

It was not gentlemanly to gape incredulously at a lady for revealing, not that she had permitted a liberty, but that she had not indulged in an orgy of them. But Peter gaped. Phryne Fisher was a woman of the widest imaginable experience of sensual pleasures and the least possible compunction in pursuing them. 

“Well, twice, but the first time didn’t count…” She sighed, and her cheeks flushed again--a sight Peter himself had only witnessed under the most strenuous of physical circumstances. "He's not... we're not...Oh, I don't know what we are!" She flung up her hands and paced back to the sofa, to pour herself another drink. She knocked it back with one toss and poured another. "He's coming after me because I asked him to. It was an impulse. A sort of a...a..." She flailed a hand in the air, “…a romantic overture."

She began pacing around the room, in a state of agitation extremely unusual in that woman of devil-may-care sang-froid. Peter watched her with bemusement.

“In all social difficulties,” he declared, invitingly, “Consult Uncle Wimsey, advisor to Dukes and Police Inspectors, all classes high and low. No entanglement too Gordian for his Razor Brain. I’ll offer you special rates for old acquaintance sake.” Peter patted the couch next to him. “Why don’t you tell old Peter all about it?”

Phryne sank back down on the sofa, combing a hand through her hair. 

“I suppose we’d been…professional associates.” she began, with a sigh. “We were working on cases together for over a year—we work so _beautifully_ together Peter—we became such good friends and slowly we were...not courting of course, I don’t _do_ courting, but we were having nightcaps on the regular and we were going to have dinner but he got knocked out, we were being interrupted all the time and he’s as flighty as a deer, as well as being a big idiot, and then he asked me to waltz, and then this whole business with flying back to England occurred to me and at the last possible moment I asked him to come after me and then he kissed me.”

Peter fortunately known Phryne of old and was also extremely quick on the uptake. absorbed the gist of the situation.

"Come after you to _England?_ But Good God, Fisher, I know to the last penny and farthing what my friend Inspector Parker makes, I’ve been drawing up marriage settlements for weeks! Policemen can’t toddle off on world cruises and take months off of work!” 

“I do _know_ that, Peter,” she snapped. "I told you it was an impulse. I didn't imagine that he'd _do_ it. He's the most bloody cautious man alive. They should say _slower_ than Jack Robinson! I had in fact quite taken now it as a harmless faux pas and now…” She drained what remained of her third cocktail. “Now I have a telegram that he's _actually coming.”_

She had been rattling on at high speed, and now plunged to a stop. She buried her sleek dark head in her hands.

“What if he’s...making _assumptions?_ What if he thinks I meant....he must be making assumptions. If he’s coming all this way…what if he’s quit his _job_? What if he thought this was some sort of test? Oh god Peter, not that I wouldn’t be happy to see him but this could be the most awful mess…” 

Peter was silent for some moments. 

“I say, Fisher,” he said slowly. “Your noble, cautious Melbourne policeman, whom, with my super-human deductive skills, I have concluded is known as Jack Robinson— you don’t by any chance mean Jack Robinson that was intelligence officer to the —th AIF?”

She lifted her head and stared at him blankly.

“Quiet sort of a chap with a face like a recruitin’ poster? Extracts from Shakespeare for every occasion?”

She gaped at him. “You are joking.”

“I am not joking! Good lord! Jack Robinson!”

“Peter you can’t _possibly_ mean—”

“I met him on one of those blasted courses they were always sending us on, sniping if I recall, and then his battalion was holding down our left flank at Wipers for months! The dear old Constable!”

His voice cracked without warning, and tears started to his eyes. He floundered for a handkerchief, cursing. It took him some minutes to restore himself. 

“I do apologise,” he muttered, flushed and embarrassed.

“Peter, don’t be an ass.” 

“The name caught me by surprise that’s all, I haven’t seen him since…I mean I didn’t know him well at all. It’s just…well I never heard if he got through, and he’s just the sort of really decent chap that usually didn’t.”

“Well,” Phryne said gently. “He got through.”

“That’s nice,” said Peter abstractedly. “It is perchance that you yourself were saved.”

They sat together in silence for a little while. 

“Now,” said Peter, abruptly assuming his usual air of airy bonhomie. “The players are assembled for the most lamentable comedy. Jack Robinson, watchman, a most lovely gentleman-like man, to play the doomed lover. Phryne Fisher, lady detective, to play the fairy queen, who finds herself enchanted in love with a mortal ass.”

Phryne gave him a look made up of equal parts embarrassment, hilarity, and terror. “I never said I was in—“ she broke off. 

“You forget I am the World’s Greatest Detective,” Peter announced grandly. “And like all comedies, surely this must end in a—“

Phryne flung a pillow at him with more than playful violence. “I told you. I am _not_ getting married.”

Peter, who had nursed many a reluctant bachelor through this crisis, gave her shoulder a bracing pat.

“But it’s quite the latest thing, marryin’ policemen! My sister is marryin’ a policeman,” he said encouragingly. “You had better snap him up, or all the policemen will be taken by the fashionable set this season.”

“Oh Peter, can you just not…not piffle right now? Just for one minute?” She glared at him “This is serious.”

Peter, who was not unconscious of the fact that he was prone to piffling, made an effort. She really did look rather green.

“Why _can’t_ you marry him? It’s not a life sentence, you know, not these days, and you keep all the property to yourself if that’s what's worrying you."

“Well why can’t we just...be together? Why should we care about conventions and rules? Why does it need to be _legal?”_

“Well," said Peter with devastating reasonableness, "Because he’s a _policeman?"_

Phryne huffed and folder her arms across her chest, frowning sullenly. "I'm ready to offer him a... exclusive... possibly...arrangement.. of some kind."

"Wonderfully magnanimous of you. But look here, Fisher,” Peter ventured, cautiously, “You can’t go about dalliancing in sin publicly with civil servants, it ain’t done. You could make things awfully difficult for him.” 

“I like that! Didn’t _you_ used to ‘own’ an opera singer, as you so disgustingly put it?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said coldly, flushing. “That was a business arrangement with a woman of the world as according to the accepted custom of our tribes. I do not go about ruining nice working class girls.”

“ _Ruining_ , Peter? honestly you’re such a relic sometimes—”

“And wasn’t Robinson married? In fact I am quite sure he was.”

“Divorced,” Phryne said quickly. “Nothing to do with me, I swear, it was all over before I got there.” She looked rather shifty, and Peter frowned at her suspiciously.

“Divorced! Poor old fellow. And we used to call him the only married man on the Western Front! But dash it all Fisher, you do realise that as a disgustingly wealthy member of the upper classes, having badgered a Poor but Honest person into compromising themselves, and then not marrying them, you could star as a villain in every melodrama since ancient Rome? Do I really need to exhort you like a paterfamilias to Do the Decent Thing? And if you can’t face it then you should have had the good taste and the self-control to leave them alone. And furthermore I’d like to know how it is that modern women have taken to reacting to having a man’s name and eternal devotion offered to them as if they were being offered three-day old fish and thank you very much but they'd rather just sleep with you and be off. What's become of Romance? Of starry-eyed I'd-be-the-happiest-girl-in-the-world-dear-Peter?" 

Phryne’s face had gone from indignation to anger, but as the tirade continued her eyebrows began to climb up her forehead.

“Something on your mind, Wimsey?” She asked wryly. “Why are you suddenly so red-hot for the institution of marriage?” Peter felt his ears grow hot.

“Not suddenly, not suddenly at all! Nought beneath the sky more sweet, more worthy is, than firm consent, of man and wife in household government, and all that. I simply hadn’t met, you know...” He trailed off.

“…Your Only Girl?” Phryne finished dryly.

If Phryne Fisher seldom blushed, Peter did so rather often, and his long beak-nosed face was turning an unbecoming beet-red. 

“If you must be vulgar,” snapped Peter. “A man’s finest feelings reduced to the drivelling refrain of a popular tune! Why don’t you just say I’ve gone _goopy over a girl!”_

Phryne considered him with an open-mouthed wonderment. "My god," she breathed. "Not you too? Have they put something in the water?”

Peter said nothing, but uttered a feeling groan. Phryne sat back and examined him, not unsympathetically. 

“I’m trying to imagine the woman you’d marry. She'd better be damned fond of listening to you talk, that's all I can say."

“She did say if anyone ever married me it would be for the pleasure of hearing me talk piffle.” Peter moaned, from under a pillow he had dragged over his face.

"You don't seem as if I should be offering _you_ congratulations?"

“If you must know," he said gloomily, "She won’t have me.”

"Well," said Phryne, with sincerity. "I am sorry Peter. I bet she didn't realise what she would have had."

"Not at all. Harriet," Peter sighed, "Is a woman of most singular discernment."

“Hang on one minute." Phryne sat up sharply, eyes narrowing. " _Harriet?_ Not _Harriet Vane,_ the mystery writer that was all over the papers? Harriet Vane the accused murderess that you rescued from the gallows at the eleventh hour though your brilliant detecting? _That_ Harriet Vane? Tell me, Peter, _tell_ me that even with your addiction to dramatics, you did not cap the thing off with an offer of your hand in marriage to the poor exhausted creature just after was released from prison.”

”I did not, as a matter of fact,” Peter said, with dignity. “I proposed to her _in_ prison. Offered to marry at the gallows foot.”

“And you accuse me of being a melodrama villain! I wonder you didn’t add the firstborn son as part of the price of getting her out, like Rumplestilskin, though I guess that was implied. Peter you absolute _cad_. Jolly well good for her! I hope she gave you a good kicking.”

"Now you're being monstrously unfair. I made it quite clear to her that I solved mysteries for fun, there was no _quid pro quo_ , and merely added that if she wanted to marry me after the inevitable triumphant conclusion I thought that would also be rather fun." 

"While she was sitting in prison _waiting to be hanged!"_

“At least I’d never do something so preposterous as demand some poor blighter on ten quid a week follow me across the globe so I can explain to them how marvellously advanced it is that I won’t marry them!”

They sat, fuming, on their opposite ends of the sofa. 

"Well," said Phryne, eventually. "Aren't we in a nice mess." 

"Only one thing for it," said Peter. He examined with distress the empty cocktail jug, then lifted it aloft. "Bunter! BUN-TERRR!"

-NOTES

\- This fic was sparked when I came across, swear to heaven, what could only be Lord Peter Wimsey meeting some Australian officers on the Western Front in 1916:

_The Guardsman makes an amusing study in contrast. He is fair, sleek, rather bald, wears a monocle and is in other respects perfectly turned out. I wondered at first how he would sort with the Australians, but in spite of his superficial manner, he is neither a snob nor a mere dandy. Best of all he has an excellent sense of humour. They get along famously, and before the end of the week the Guardsman will be the most popular man here._

This is from the memoir _[Subaltern on the Somme](https://archive.org/details/subalternonsomme00mark/page/176) _(one of the best memoirs to start with to get a sense of WWI btw) _\--_ as it was published in 1927 and the first Wimsey story came out in 1923, it seems impossible that the unnamed Guardsman was an inspiration, but the resemblance is uncanny. After about 55 aborted attempts to write the necessary introductory fic set in the war, I gave it up and so leave that coincidence to dangle on its own.

\- According to the [Wimsey timeline](http://plaza.ufl.edu/sibenny/project1/timeline.html), Harriet Vane is acquitted in January 1930, almost perfectly intersecting with the late 1929 date of Phryne arriving in England. I thought Peter might have some feelings about modern women, marriage, and people reluctantly being talked into Living in Sin about that time! I regret to say later instalments of this fic will not be so tidily accurate with timelines, I'm having to drag Alleyn and Campion back form the late '30s.

\- Peter is somewhat overestimating Jack's salary at 10 quid a week- it was £430p.a. Ask me about salaries of the 1920s!

\- the marriage settlement Peter arranges for his sister Lady Mary, when she marries working-class cop Inspector Parker, is to put all her fortune in a trust that will always pay her a sum exactly equal to her husband's salary. Parker being at something around 4-500 a year, together they'd have about a £1000 p.a., a decent middle-class salary equivalent to say that of a middling lawyer. 


	2. The Jack Problem

> _The less love in a detective-story the better. “L’amuor au theatre,” says Racine, “ne peut pas etre en seconde place,” and this holds good of detective fiction. A casual and perfunctory love-story is worse than no love story at all, and, since the mystery must, by hypothesis, take the first place, the love is better left out._ -Dorothy L Sayers

_Come after me!_

What on earth had possessed to her to say something so utterly, so catastrophically foolish?

She had solved her murders, rescued her father, married off her Dot in a cozy happy ending. She had sat next to Jack ( _her_ Jack? No, not her Jack) at the wedding, while he regarded her with a quiet farewell out of the corner of his eye. She had barely met his eye that last day, not since she had snatched herself away from his _romantic overture_ , her senses suddenly sharpening to see the hidden clue, the universe providing a convenient escape. An urgency to move, to get away, to finish things here and start a new story, consumed her. Everything was finished, her grand finale, the fairy benefactress drawing a curtain over her magical adventures.

He, of course, being Jack, had quietly accepted it all.

And just as she was releasing the brake on her nimble little aeroplane, lifting her nose to smell the wind that would sweep her off, she had seen his shabby motorcar bouncing down the road, seen his familiar shrouded figure stoop out of it, and just like that, her own body, without any apparent direction from her brain, had leap to earth and was racing back to him. She had, simply, been so happy to see him. Now that Jack was here, everything would be complete.  She had looked up at him, smiling so hard her face hurt, and promising nothing and asking everything, spoke those three damned words.

_Come after me._

And he had kissed her at last, not in the least tentatively, but confidently, familiar, almost domestic—as if he had kissed her goodbye a thousand times.  Possibly he had, inside that beautiful thick head of his.

She had spun and bolted immediately, feeling the brush of a rope around her neck, of birdlime sticking on her feet. No ballast here—soon she was lifting high above it all, just as she liked it; the agonised moans of her father only adding to that sweet feeling of power, of mastery over her circumstances. She grinned wildly into the whipping winds. Halfway through her ascent, climbing easily upward in the clear morning air, she tipped a wing to orient herself, the landscape shrunk down to a two-dimensional map of itself. 

Jack was still there, and even from a thousand feet in the air she could see him sloping against the police motorcar with his hands in his pockets in a way achingly familiar, achingly dear. As he shrank into the distance, she thought warmly: Jack would still be there, if she flew back next week, or next year, or ten years from now.

It was only then that a doubt flickered over her. What had she asked of him, exactly? _Come after me._ It had seemed so right when she had said it. She would never by tied down, but Jack flying next to her, equally free, suddenly seemed a fantastically, joyfully simple solution.

Except they were not, of course, anything like equally free. He would have to drive back to his piles of paperwork in that dingy office in City South for eight a.m sharp. Even that poky little car wasn't his. It had been a mad thing to say. Hours later and three hundred miles away, waiting to refuel, she hovered over a telegraph slip.

_I’ll come back for you._

_Wait for me._

_I love you._

Wrong, wrong, wrong. She flung down her pen, collared her father, and hauled them both back into the air the moment the fuel truck retracted.

In the the constant urgency of events, weather, mechanical failures, in the quarrels with her father, in the shifting winds of the financial news, in the increasing rush of press and telegrams, in old friends, new mysteries, in all the wonders of the whole world out there, the problem of Jack receded from her mind.

Jack couldn’t cross a room to make his move on her; why would she think he would cross the globe?

Jack’s telegram that he was coming to London was waiting for her when she arrived, plain and enigmatic as the man himself. Her stomach swooped upwards, then plunged, then began doing slow rolls.

Meanwhile, in mocking counterpoint, her parents enacted their ghastly reunion scene, her mother stoic and tolerant, father weeping charmingly. _You are the love of my life, I would never want to hurt you, you know I'll always come back to you_ , and on and on, just like always. And just like always, her mother had fallen for it. And then he had swept up the stairs and let slip his hateful smug smile of the man who had had his cake and eaten it.

Even though she had orchestrated this entire scene, Phryne was infuriated with both of them, with her father for getting away with it all once again, with her mother for playing her part of all-forgiving, all-enduring wife. 

“You could at least have made it a bit harder for him,” Phryne growled. "He'll just be off again."

“Oh, you know your father,” her mother said, with that sad little smile. “He is who he is. He'll never give that up.”

And Phryne suddenly realised who Jack’s little self-mocking smile had always reminded her of, realised how vain was her determination that she would never reenact her parent’s marriage,and how ridiculous it was that she thought it was Jack who needed a session on the psychiatrist’s couch.

She went into her room, poured herself a large whiskey, and laughed until she cried.

She bought a car, small, fast and agile, an excellent escape vehicle. She flung clothes into a bag, flung herself and the bag into the car, and drove furiously, reaching the coast by the end of the day, turning in a random direction, and feeling that this little island was oppressively, maddeningly small. She could circle it in a week, pacing around it like a panther. The whole earth, after her flight, didn’t seem large enough to satisfy her, if she could be on the other side of it in less than a month. She needed universes to swallow her restlessness. At the very least, she needed a murder to solve.

In this mood she met the charms of British seaside resorts in a grey, cold, November of abruptly cancelled holidays, shuttered hotels, anxious faces.

There was a corpse, of course, but it was just a sordid and obvious suicide, and the local police stared through her blankly.

Jack had never looked at her like that, not from the first. If only he were here already! He would complain about her driving, and she would laugh at his primness. He would have Shakespeare quotations at ready for the places and the flora, and be interested in the geology of the cliffs. He would regard her with those ocean-blue eyes, now disapproving, now amused, but always so intelligent, and always _seeing_ her _._ The whole scene would be so much more interesting if Jack were there to talk to and tease, so much more alive. She would wear something that would make him blush, and she would flirt and brush his knee and… and then something, finally, would _happen_. 

It would be so beautiful between them. And afterwards… If she didn’t think about _afterwards_ , about how this story would end, she was eager, she was _desperate_ , to be near him again. 

Having paced around the confines of England, she circled back to London, where at least there would be lights and noise at night.

It was lovely to see Peter again. But good lord, she’d forgotten quite how much Peter could _talk_ , and how much of it was sheer piffle, and how he couldn’t seem to get through a sentence on his own without dragging up something out of a book. Jack was as careful with words as he was with everything else: when he said something, you knew that he meant it. Not for the first time, she felt the paradoxical need to talk with Jack over the Jack problem. Who else could so calmly and quietly smooth out the tangle of her racing thoughts? A nice nightcap with Jack, where they could wrap up the mystery of What To Do About Jack, that was what she needed. She and Peter had always been too much alike, rattling against each other trying to be more clever, more charming, more right. And of course Peter, at heart a romantic old Tory, all Duty and Honour, wouldn't be able to _see_ that her story couldn't possibly end in a marriage. 

It was strange to think of Peter in love, _really_ in love. He had always seemed so perfectly self-contained, so exactly the same every time they met. What on earth did Peter need a wife for? He had Bunter to take care of things for him and admire him and listen to him rabbit on for hours. This Vane woman was obviously a person of good sense, and Phryne hoped she had enough of that sense to keep clear of him in future--Peter could be so _relentless,_ and he hated it when people didn't fall for him. He did so need people to _like_ him. He even pursued the murderers he caught into their prison cells, demanding forgiveness. But Peter _in_ love, allowing a breach in that impeccable, invulnerable shell! No, it was ridiculous. He would swallow up any human woman. Peter should stay Peter, with his perfect bachelor existence, solving mysteries and breaking hearts, forever. 

She was perfectly aware that she was also, in her fashion, _in love._ She was always ready for new experiences, and she was intrigued by this one. It felt so unlike the ugly, suffocating obsession, violent and sickly, she had in Paris in those terrible months after the war. It felt _fun_ , and she was sure she could carry off being in love like this beautifully. But why, why did it have to be _Jack?_ Why couldn’t it have been someone independent and comfortable from her own bohemian, aristocratic worlds? People who either had so much, or so little, money and status that they had nothing to lose? Someone with whom she could fall into an amicable agreement of mutual satisfactions, with whom she could stay just exactly as she was? 

She felt a sudden unaccountable irritation at Lin Chung, of all people. Lin might have been _designed_ for her—her equal and balance in every way, powerful and worldly, inhabiting as she did a sphere proudly separate from ‘respectable’ society. Someone with his own large fortune and busy affairs quite independent from hers. Someone from a culture that understood the sort of civilised arrangement she could contemplate as a variant from her usual fleeting affairs. If only he hadn’t suddenly manifested that thuddingly dull possessiveness and then exited stage right, they could have carried on as they were indefinitely. 

But this was a red herring, a distraction from the real mystery: why had she fallen so hard for a thoroughly monogamous, painfully serious, respectable, sensitive, working-class man _?_ And why, at the very moment of her escape, had she said something that would so thoroughly entangle him with her, if he took her at her word?

She needed her head examined.

Yes! Phyrne sat up. _Yes_. That was _exactly_ what she needed.


	3. Mrs. Bradley's Finger

> _Gladys Mitchell’s psychoanalyst sleuth Mrs. Lestrange Bradley first appeared in_ Speedy Death _in 1929. Fabulously rich, always right, shattering every piety and convention, and, despite being in her seventies, a pistol-packing judo-wrestling action-hero, she is a major influence on the Miss Fisher mysteries IMO. To those familiar with Mrs Bradley, the stylish and sexy sleuth played by Diana Rigg in the short-lived BBC series—this is the Mrs Bradley from the books, who is a different creature entirely._

Phryne Fisher approached Mrs Bradley’s large Kensington mansion with the usual feeling of eagerness, trepidation, and a girding of loins for a battle.

It had taken several days to manage an appointment. Mrs Bradley--celebrated public intellectual, psychiatric consultant to the Home Office, international authority on morbid psychology--was not an easy woman to pin down. It was by by sheer good luck that she was between conferences, murder cases, and visits to her sprawling and confusing family tree.

Phryne had been a fifteen-year-old tearaway when she had been sent to Mrs. Bradley. Her extremely expensive, extremely worried finishing school had felt Something Must Be Done About the Fisher Girl. And they had not even known of the greater part of Phryne’s delinquencies! Mrs. Bradley was sent for, at a vast fee. Mrs Bradley had shoved her onto the couch in her consulting room, peppered her with impatient questions, then listened while Phryne wheedled, grandstanded, raged, and eventually cried. The psychoanalyst nodded to herself, tossed a handkerchief at her, and announced that Phryne was a healthy, vigorous young animal, whose unhappy and disordered childhood had naturally produced some kicks to her gallop. Attempts at restraint would only produce a neurosis. She spent their remaining sessions together teaching Phryne to throw knives.

Phryne had known from then on that she wanted to grow up to be exactly like Mrs Bradley—although, ideally, sexually attractive and far better dressed.

The housekeeper admitted her to the dark and cluttered hallway, led her down a passage, then down another passage, up and then down some flights of stairs, and left her in a dim little parlour. Phryne always became disoriented the moment she came into this house; it was full of tiny rooms crammed with unusual things, none of which seemed clearly connected to each other. 

"Phryne Fisher!"

A small creature materialised out of the gloom behind Phryne with the suddenness of a Cheshire cat. It was wrapped in thick hairy tweed and what appeared to be a modified crocheted blanket in sulphuric yellow and purple. Only long and painful experience allowed Phryne to duck away in time from a sharp poke in the ribs with that yellow, claw-like finger.

"Missed me again Beatrice!" Phryne grinned.

Mrs. Bradley burst into an evil cackling laugh that made country folk cross their fingers and touch wood at her. Even Phryne couldn’t help feeling a superstitious chill slip up her spine. The old lady hadn't altered a hair in twenty years; in twenty more she would still look exactly like this--avian, reptilian, like one of the smaller species of pterodactyl. In spite of her shrivelled appearance she gave an impression, correctly, of immense physical power.

The old woman looked up at her, black eyes sparking with a dissecting interest at once benign and predatory, thin lips stretched back from her strong white teeth in a crocodilian smile. 

“Phryne, dear child, I hope you have also come for Henri’s excellent cooking,” she drawled, in that deep silky voice so at odds with her looks. “But you indicate to me you are troubled in mind, so I cleared a space in my consulting calendar at once. As the central successful case study in my monograph ‘Ego and Libido’ I am keen to ensure that you are, so to speak, kept tuned up.”

And she wrapped her yellow claws with a vice-grip around Phryne’s elbow and towed her up to her lair.

Mrs. Bradley’s study was densely packed with the artefacts of a long and adventurous life. Art and weaponry from around the globe, knives and spears with well-worn handles, piles of wool and knitting needles, cases of stuffed animals, some unrecognisable as any known species. The red velvet couch with Mrs. Bradley’s armchair looming behind it stood like a stage prop in the dim light from the dusty window. A blazing fire in the smoking chimney filled the room with a stupefying hazy heat.

Phryne lay down, tensely, on the couch. Mrs. Bradley’s presence behind her was not soothing. Phryne couldn’t help wanting to turn around to check that the old woman hadn’t transmogrified into her true dragonish form as soon as her back was turned. She was sure she heard a scrape of scales on the floor.

“Stop fidgeting, child!” Mrs. Bradley poked a finger sharply into the top of Phryne’s head. Phryne squirmed herself farther down the couch.

“Now, child, what seems to be the problem?

“Well,” Phryne said, taking a deep breath. “I think I’m in love.”

"Odd," said Mrs Bradley neutrally. "Expound.”

Phryne expounded.

“Hmm." Mrs. Bradley scribbled for some time in her notebook. "It is significant that the man is a policeman. Your guilt-complex may be manifesting itself again. Do you find yourself craving being incarcerated by him?"

Phryne pondered this. "I...I did tell him to 'come after me'."

"Aha! And do you have thoughts of this man punishing you in other ways?"

"Uh.." 

Mrs. Bradley cackled. “Naturally you do! And now you have forbidden fantasies of the ultimate incarceration: marriage."

Phryne turned to glare balefully at her. "You're drawing conclusions without much evidence, Beatrice."

"And yet I am correct, as always, am I not!"

"Nonsense," said Phryne stoutly. "I haven't been thinking of any such thing. I'm not the marrying kind."

“And what kind is that?" Mrs Bradley grinned at her with her crocodile smile. "I myself have married three times for reasons of my own. Being young and in love. Money. Children of course. As an experiment in genetics it produced disappointing but significant results. My nephews are far more interesting than my sons, who have proved to be merely conventionally brilliant. It is possible that in my efforts to aid them to avoid an Oedipal Complex I misjudged. Speaking of nephews if you decide you have need of immediate gratification you should visit my nephew Carey—he’s still a bachelor, you know.”

“No,” said Phryne, firmly. The Byronically beautiful Carey was a marvellous specimen, reeking of sexuality; but also reeking of the pigs he bred on scientific principles. “I’ve already heard more about pig farming than I ever want to again.”

"Shame. In any case, you do not seem to have a problem. You love him, he loves you. You can be marvellous bedfellows and provide each other with alibis when necessary. Where is the pathology here?"

"I don't _like_ it." Phryne erupted. "I didn't _choose_ it. It's something that _happened_ to me." 

Mrs. Bradley tilted her head benignly. “Dear child” she said, her voice dropping from her usual sardonic tone into something softer and kinder. She laid an unexpectedly gentle claw on Phryne’s shoulder. “You have a loving heart. You have endured terrible things. This man appeared as a figure of comfort and support during a tumultuous time, and closed the case on the great unresolved darkness of your childhood. At the same time, the inadequacies of your father in the role of protector were lamentably before you. The policeman represents, as literally a person can, order, authority, civilisation—police, polite, politic, the virtues of the _polis_ \--a safe and reliable home. Your subconscious recognised an unmet need. You did choose it, not with your conscious mind, but you, nevertheless.”

 _“His_ reactions to _you_ ,” she added, “As a repressed melancholic with an over-dominant superego, in the middle of a divorce, hardly require the aid of an analyst.”

Phryne gazed at the ceiling. It all made so much sense. Mystery solved. She felt calmer, but also a little deflated. "So how can you... cure me?"

 _“What?”_ Mrs Bradley positively squawked. “Why?"

"Because I can't be _in love_ ," Phryne wailed. "It's not who I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to be a perfectly independent woman."

"Unusual for the superego to demand behaviour _against_ social convention," Mrs. Bradely said in musing tones. "But when one's ego-ideal takes on such a form, there's logic to't."

"I _can_ hear you." Phryne crossed her arms. "If you're going to tell me I have to marry him, I'm walking out."

“Marriage is a completely separate matter from love, child." Mrs Bradley looked rather shocked. "The reasons for marrying are few but for those to whom they apply they are compelling ones. These are: the legitimisation of a pregnancy in a censorious age; the regularisation of property and domestic labour; or to fulfil the mutual obsessions of a sadist and a masochist. Sadist plus masochist equals a happy marriage I always say. It does sound as though this man may be a masochist—you may have read my “On the Psychology of Martyrs”—but unfortunately you are not a sadist, child.

Phryne felt tremendously relieved. "No reasons for me, then!"

"There is one-you are rich and he is poor."

"So I should get married?" Phryne quavered, terrified.

"Not necessarily! You have a problem of economics; there is more than one solution of economics."

Phryne narrowed her eyes, pondering.

“You shall have to pay him, of course, child!” Mrs. Bradley said sternly, “You could probably run to a police inspector out of your hat budget. But you must take responsibility for the economic and reputational costs to him of providing you with companionship. He may well be sacked from his job. He would be foregoing the services of a wife, which are valuable ones, and the possibility of children, on whom men of his class rely for care in their old age, so you should consider a pension as well. I believe men of probity pension their mistresses, after all, although that is generally in the form of saleable jewellery.”

“I pay my chauffeur an _enormous_ salary,” Mrs Bradley added, then pitched into her hyena-cackle, and Phryne was too late to dodge the dig in the ribs from that sharp and shockingly powerful finger.

NOTES

\- Sixty-six Mrs Bradley books were published between 1929 (when Mitchell was only 18) and 1983; they never sold big numbers and tend to drop out of print, but they have a loyal cult following. Their surreal, rambling plots make them a bit of an acquired taste—Phillip Larkin, who loved them, admitted “it is not impossible for the reader to finish a book without grasping not only who the murderer is, but sometimes even who has been murdered.” They are hilarious and wonderful and my favourite Golden Age mysteries (except when my favourite is Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham or Dorothy Sayers...). They will certainly shatter any idea of Golden Age mystery as cosy and conservative—how an age that banned _Lady Chatterley’s Lover_ let _The Saltmarsh Murders_ cheerful stew of infanticide, incest, adultery, interracial and unmarried sex go by unmolested is a mystery. Never mind how Mitchell kept her job as a games mistress at a girls’ school while writing such scandalous books!

The ‘80s BBC TV series starring Diana Rigg is highly entertaining on its own merits, and Diana Rigg is of course wonderful, but it unfortunately lost the unique atmosphere and absurdism of the books (I think they changed _every single_ solution into something more conventional). The BBC did a more faithful radio adaption in the ‘90s; she is played by Mary Wimbush, who does full justice to Mrs. Bradley’s eldritch cackle. Gladys Mitchell rejoices in a [comprehensive fan site](https://www.gladysmitchell.com/).

\- “Sadist plus masochist equals a happy marriage” is from _The Saltmarsh Murders_ , as is “Ego and Libido”, a talk Mrs Bradley proposes giving at the Church Hall.

\- I don’t _think_ anything untoward is ever hinted at between George the stolid chauffeur and Mrs Bradley in the books (innuendo in that direction is a feature of the tv series), but I certainly wouldn’t put it past her.


	4. The Jack Problem, Solved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This does have a happy ending--and a Phrack happy ending too!--but there will be some bumps.

> The perfect mystery cannot be written. Something must always be sacrificed. […]Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem. - _Raymond Chandler_

Jack’s maddeningly ambiguous telegram had said only that he on his way to London, and that he would call on her. It took only the mildest of detective work to determine his likely ship. Had he expected her to work it out, to be waiting for him? Jack’s mysterious _expectations_ were taking up an unsettling amount of her mind. He wouldn't really expect marriage, would he? They had discussed it, in their oblique way. _It would take a brave man to propose to you_ , he had said, his voice light. _Or a very foolish one_ , she had replied, looking everywhere but at him. She had not seen his face. But surely he understood.

She had just about resolved that she would not go and meet him, to establish from the start who controlled her activities, when a telegram arrived saying he had been delayed in France. 

Phryne knew where he had gone. She had made that stop herself, to linger over the memorials and graves and grown-over fields, raise a glass in some old familiar estaminet. Jack, so slow and considered in everything, would take several days there, she decided.

So when Jack did arrive, a day later, late on a damp Tuesday evening, he took her completely by surprise.

Phyrne had not spent one night under the same roof as her parents on arriving in England. Even to please her mother, she couldn’t bear that crumbling townhouse her father had inherited with the Baronetcy, a damp, creaking relic of dim rooms and heavy furniture. It always dragged her back, like a stone weight, twenty years into the past, when it still had gas lights that dimmed and flared unpredictably. To an endless time when she had wept and raged in that ugly oppressive luxury, her sister somewhere lost and looking for her a half a world away. She left her parents to their reminiscences, and escaped off to the Savoy. 

As was her habit, she bought property. The timing could not have been better. London was teeming with panicked sellers and no buyers. For a song she picked up a penthouse in a brand-new soaring apartment block, the very latest in luxury. It had every possible modern convenience, central heating, electric dumb-waiters to whisk up orders telephoned from the restaurant. It even had a self-operating lift, although an operator could be summoned with a button by those too nervous to soar up on their own. It was no Wardlow, so full of life and character, but for the moment, the anonymity suited her. The blank white corridors were always empty. In the months Phryne had been there she had barely exchanged two words with the same neighbour twice. The staff, lodged invisibly in the bowels of the building,had the blank, gently smiling imperturbability of a platoon of Mr. Butlers.

It was one of these disembodied voices on the telephone that told her, in an expressionless crackle, that a gentleman was calling for her, an Inspector Robinson arrived from Australia. 

“Send him up, thank you—Graham, isn’t it?” Her voice was admirably calm. 

“Yes, Miss. Thank you, Miss. Goodnight Miss.”

She paced up and down. She refused to check herself in a mirror. Jack would have to take her as she came. Jack had always taken her, or rather not taken her, as she came. 

The double-rap at the door was so familiar she felt tears start to her eyes.

She wiped them away, raked her hands through her hair, took a deep breath, put her most cheerfully uncomplicated smile on her face, and opened the door. 

"Jack!" 

She managed to sound perfectly normal, as if Jack had simply strolled a mile or so from his office to Wardlow for a nightcap. 

“Miss Fisher.” 

He had just taken off his hat. Framed frozen in the doorway against the blank white wall, he looked like a photograph of himself. The image of Jack in her memory had drifted a little askew of the real man in front of her. He looked a little greyer, not quite so strikingly handsome, a little more like an ordinary man. He was wearing his good grey suit, a tie she recalled being fond of, and his eternal grey coat. For a long minute they simply stood and looked at each other. 

"You've come all this way, Jack,” Phryne said softly. “You might as well take a few more steps.” She realised she was blocking his way, standing equally frozen in the doorway. She stepped back. 

Obediently, he came forward, and she shut the door behind him. He was so close to her that she could smell the dampness on the cloth of his coat. Impulsively, she reached out and ran a hand along the silk of his tie. “I do like that tie.” 

Then, equally without thinking, she leaned up and kissed him, softly, on the lips. He neither pulled away nor leaned into it, but stayed perfectlly still.

“Is this the way we say hello now?” he said, his gravelly voice rough. She had, if anything, forgotten how quite how shockingly beautiful that voice was. 

“Well, it’s the way we say goodbye, so we might as well keep up the habit,” she teased lightly. She converted an instinctive move to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him again into a playful brush at his tie. He looked at her mutely. His face was as uttery unreadable as she had ever seen it. 

She helped him out of his coat, their bodies stepping easily through that familiar routine. They deftly avoided each other’s eyes. Phryne was concentrating on silently demanding that her heart stop pounding so hard that he must certainly hear it. Some old instinct was telling her that she must not give herself away, as though she were playing high-stakes poker, or hiding from a stalking enemy. 

Jack was looking curiously around the apartment—all glossy surfaces and sleekly designed fittings, abstract art on the walls. “This is very modern,” he said, wandering a little way into the large room. He was still holding onto his hat. 

She watched as he ran the tip of a finger lightly along the swooping curve of a lamp. 

“ _I’m_ very modern,” she said, more pointedly than she had meant.

He turned to look at her. Then he smiled. It was one of his tiny, flickering smiles that warmed his austere features like a lit candle. “So you are.” He tipped his head to one side. “You fit right in here.”

“You look right anywhere, Jack.” She smiled back at him softly. “You’re a classic.”

For a moment all the awkwardness evaporated. This was not an enemy come to entrap her. This was Jack, one of her closest friends, her good, decent, liberal-minded, ridiculous Jack. All of that vital thing between them, that made her feel more alive, more real, more connected to the earth,flowed into her. God, it was good to see him.

Then Jack cleared his throat and turned away. He went across the plush carpet to look out over the city, a fine glittering panorama from the seventh floor.

Inside her imagination, so often, they had fallen into each other’s arms at this point with wild, uncomplicated passion. She had rather forgotten they did not, generally, do such things in their actual life.

“Would you like a drink?” She heard herself ask, brightly.

He turned back to her and nodded, his own politely social smile in place. “Yes, thank you.”

Phryne with determined gaiety glided over to the drinks cabinet and busied herself making something complicated, to preoccupy herself.

“How was your trip?” she trilled. “Are you a good sailor? You look a little off-colour. Is the ground still swaying under your feet?”

He took up her bantering tone. “It wasn’t so much the swaying of the ship as my cabin-fellows’ snoring that made it hard to sleep. They ought to form a novelty orchestra.”

“Oh Jack, you never came steerage!” She looked at his grey, drawn face in dismay, feeling a surge of unfair but unsurpressable irritation at him. He stared at her, discomfited, looking as though this was the very last subject he wanted to discuss.

“Well, I did, but I’m on the taxpayer’s shilling, and it’s all the department would stretch to these days. ”

“The taxpayer’s shilling?” she echoed, blankly.

“Uh, yes.” He turned away to look back out of the window again. “I’m on attachment to Scotland Yard. For training in modern policing methods. It’s a new scheme they have for colonial police forces.”

“Oh!”

Her first feeling was an enormous flood of relief. The ground that had been shifting under her feet suddenly firmed. Her clever Jack! Of course he hadn’t chucked his job and come to throw himself, dependent, at her feet. Nothing had changed, they were both their own selves, there had been nothing to worry about. Although…in some part of her it nettled a bit. It was rather unromantic and cautious and… _practical._ Well, that was Jack all over. 

She caught him watching her face closely, scanning over it for clues. She quickly restored her brightly curious expression. Happy to see him of course, but not too happy.

She crossed over to to him, the two drinks in her hands. What had she put in them? She had lost track of what she was doing. Well, it was good cold gin, how bad could they be.

“That's wonderful, Jack, though I’m sure Scotland Yard can learn a thing or two from you," she said, handing him his cocktail glass. He made a noncommittal hum, taking the delicate crystal in his big calloused hand. Their fingers brushed over each other, and Phyrne felt the touch will all the old fire, and all the old uncertainty about what to do about it. From the tense set of his mouth he felt the same. What was wrong with him?Was it just habit preventing him from taking what he had come all this way for? 

"To modern methods!" she toasted, with an impish smile. She offered her glass.  He touched it gently with his, the chime of crystal sounding unaturally loud to Phryne’s ears. 

He took a distracted sip of his drink, coughed, and swallowed it with difficulty. Phryne took a sniff of her own and laughed. "I'm no Mr. Butler, I'm afraid." 

He smiled. “No, you’re not.” He hesitated, then put his drink down on a low table, and slipped his hand into his pocket. He looked at her intently, his eyes dark and unreadable. 

“Are you starting at the Yard immediately?” She found herself eager to fill the silence herself, before Jack could say something fatal. “Can you get me into some good murders? I’ll be counting on you to let me know about any interesting cases, Inspector.”

“It will be mostly lectures, from what I understand.” He looked both very serious and very nervous in a way that made dread clench suddenly in Phryne’s stomach. “But I’m not really here for that.” 

“Oh?” she said, and cursed her breathlessness. Jack wavered in double-vision before her. Her dear beloved friend. An adversary come to capture her. 

“It’s been…” he started, then cleared his throat. He turned suddenly, taking a few steps away, turning his hat in his hands. Without a fireplace to lean on in this centrally-heated flat, he seemed not quite to know what to do with himself.

“The Melbourne police force,” he resumed, completely unexpectedly, “Has been in a bad state for quite some time. Since before the strike…” He huffed out a laugh and managed a version of his rueful smile. ”Well, it’s never been a good state, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Phryne took some time to reorganise her thoughts around this subject. "True," she agreed. 

“After the…after the events of last year, there have been some meetings, and it’s been decided we need a new broom. Someone everyone can get behind. I’ve been sent to persuade someone from Scotland Yard to come back to Melbourne, and reorganise the police force, top to bottom.”

She watched him as he moved back to look out the window. There was something ominous and familiar in his downcast gaze, the way he was turning his hat over and over in his hands. 

“I’ve been offered a Chief Inspector post, when I get back.” He was looking fixedly out at the lights of the city. “To head a new department, to police the police.Well, I say department...it’s just myself and possibly a sergeant or two at the moment.”

“That sounds—” Phryne hesitated. “Serious.” 

He smiled faintly at the allusion.“It is.”

“Congratulations.” Phryne’s heart had stopped pounding. It seemed to have stopped entirely. 

“I have a few months here—I’ll see what I can do about getting you into an interesting case. I’d like to watch you run rings around some Scotland Yard boys.” 

“A few months.” Phryne repeated. 

“And then,” he said quietly. “It’s all got to stop, Phryne.”

“All what’s got to stop?” She couldn’t seem to do anything but reflect his words back at him.

“Investigating cases together, giving you access to police files, the nightcaps… All of it.” He looked down at the floor. “Everything has to be by the book from now on. I’ve got to be bulletproof.”

Phryne's heart had restarted, louder than ever, now in the vicinity of her throat. 

“It shouldn’t interfere with your work, if you come back to Melbourne” Jack was saying, “I won’t be on homicide, for the most part, they reckon I’d have my hands full enough.”

"I see," Phryne said. She took a breath.  “And you can’t be seen going about with a notorious loose woman.” She hated how brittle her voice sounded. 

Jack closed his eyes. Then he sighed, and his shoulders dropped. “You know I don’t think like that. But the men have been running riot for years. There’s going to be a lot of people determined to undermine this. I can't afford to give them any ammunition. It has to be made clear that no one is above the rules.”

A long silence stretched between them. Phryne absently picked up his untouched glass from the table and returned it to the drinks cabinet. No doubt one of the silent, invisible servants of this place would clear it up. She wordless poured out two neat whiskeys, and handed one to Jack. He took it sombrely, his head hanging low. 

“So, you didn’t come after me.” She said it without heat, a statement of fact.

His head came up with a jerk. “I had half wondered if you’d forgotten about that.”

“No.” Phryne murmured. “I hadn’t forgotten.”

“I thought,” he said, carefully, “That I should wait for a telegram.”

“No you were quite right, it was an impulse of the moment. I wouldn’t expect you to—” She broke off, and took a pensive sip of her whiskey. "That sounds like a hell of job you're going back to, Jack."

He made one of his considering, ironical frowns. "I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Particularly when we have to tell the men we're all taking pay cuts to boot. There's hard times coming, they say, though you no doubt know much more about it than I do." He waved his hat in the direction of the global economy. " But this has to be done. It ought," His voice turned hard, his gaze distant. "It ought to have been done years ago." 

His face twisted suddenly.  “When I got back from France, in ’19," he said, in a hoarse voice. I was...I was very tired." 

Phrne stared at him. He sank slowly down onto the sofa behind him, dropping his hat onto his lap. 

"And I let everything go to hell." He brushed a hand over his face.  "My marriage, my job… after the strike, all my plans to turn that place around… I just gave up. I've just been keeping my head down, telling myself it was enough to be one good cop.”

Phryne sat down next to him. “Oh Jack, you're so much more than just--” 

“I had a corrupt sergeant in my own station, Phryne!" He lifted a hand at her protest. "Or have you forgotten the time one of my own men held a gun to your head? And George—” He broke off, and passed a hand over his face. “I should have known what was happening. There’s hardly a man at Russel Street that wasn’t on the take, in some way or other, they barely even understand it’s wrong.”

“And then you came. Phryne." He looked up at her, his eyes desperately earnest. "You. You didn’t let anything stop you. You didn’t let anything go. It wasn’t your responsibility, but you saw a problem and you came in and took command. I saw you making a difference in the lives of so many people while I've just been going from one job to the next. You.. I can never repay what you've done for me. I can only try to make something of the same difference to the people under my care." 

"You don't owe me a thing Jack." She put a hand on his shoulder. He swallowed hard, his face turned away.

"Well," he said, with a weak smile, "At least I could try to find you a nice murder before I go."

She looked at the weary hard planes of his face, the strong lines of his throat, the big, capable hands wrapped around the whiskey glass.

"So, Inspector" she said, in a new tone. "I'll reserve the Chief Inspector for the moment--the nightcaps have to stop when you return to Melbourne."

"Yes." He stared into his whiskey glass.

"And before then? You seem to be having a nightcap with me right now." She traced delicately over his fingers that were holding the glass. He inhaled sharply and met her eyes, his own dark and troubled. 

"I think," he said, in a low voice, "That it would be all right for us to spend some time together, while I'm here. If you wanted to."

"Spend some time together?" she purred, and watched him flush.

"Phryne-" She had so seldom heard him use her name, and always in extremities of life and death. She realised now he'd been using it all along. "Phryne, I'm not a man who has ever, uh..." he trailed off, in wretched embarrassment.

"I would never promise forever anyways, Jack." She smiled at him, calm, seductive, teasing. "Just one gaudy night?"

“Well,” he said, looking flustered. “I’m here for four months, so—” he trailed off.

“Shall we synchronise our watches?” she said dryly.

He huffed out an unhappy laugh. “Phryne, be patient with me. I don’t know how these things are done.” 

“‘These things’? You mean love affairs?” She was amazed at how airily light her voice sounded. “There isn’t a book of regulations, Jack. It’s just two people having some fun together, that’s all. I'll show you how it's done.”

He nodded, his mouth a grim line, a suspicious shine in the corner of his eye. He looked more like a man being sent into No-Man's-Land than a man about to have some fun.

“Thank you.” He said this simply, in so exactly his usual tone of grave politeness Phryne didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or burst into tears.

He did not make any move to touch her. She hadn’t really expect him to suddenly sweep her into his arms growling “Darling!”, but he didn’t seem to know how to proceed from here. Phyne found that, in spite of her vast experience in such matters, she didn't quite know how either.

“Well!” she said instead, with a brisk friendliness. “I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone our _affair_ for tonight, Jack. I have an engagement as it happens.” She couldn’t seem to remove this fixed charming, indifferent smile from her face. 

“Of course,” he said bleakly. “I'm sorry to have...I don’t—" He ran out of words. Abruptly, he finished off his whiskey with an efficient twist of his glass, then he went to the door and shrugged on his coat. Phryne was struck, as she sometimes was, with his unconscious, fluid grace.

“Miss Fisher,” he said, lifting his hat to her on at the threshold.

“Jack!”

He turned at the door. 

“I don’t know where you’re staying.” Had she given anything away with the crack in her voice? 

He gave her a long look from under the brim of his hat. “I thought you were a detective, Miss Fisher,” he rumbled. He pulled his notebook out from his breast pocket and scribbled an address in his neat small hand. Then he was gone. 

NOTES. Sure, sex is great, but have you considered instead a deep dive into the history of Melbourne policing?

\- _You never came steerage_ \-- I’m pretty sure Jack on his own dime would have travelled steerage (£68 return for a place in a 4-berth cabin vs £144 for second-class—the choice for someone on £430 a year would be obvious). The _Crypt of Tears_ trailer mind you has Jack evidently renting a car and having a stylin’ new outfit for this trip, ruinous extravagances for a man in his position, so once again I’m left wondering if either Jack has a private income, or if I’m just not supposed to be thinking about the economics of the situation. Good luck with that, movie, I will _always_ think about the economics of a situation. 

- _Scotland Yard training for police detectives from the colonies_ \- Fact! [starting, serendipitously, in 1928 ](http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168693696)

- _The Melbourne Police has been in a bad state_ for quite some time- Fact, alas. The universal judgement of the papers from the archives is that the Victoria police were one of the lowest paid, worst trained, most desperately understaffed, police service in the Empire, infamous for i[ncompetence](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/250187537) and [corruption](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/208125111).

- _I’ve been sent to persuade someone from Scotland Yard to come back to Melbourne, and reorganise the police force._ Okay so! [This actually happened,](http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11891883) although not until 1936 and arranged by ‘cablegram’ according to the papers. However it did happen just after [Melbourne’s police commissioner was asked to resign](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11890683?searchTerm=blamey%20resign&searchLimits=dateFrom=1925-01-01%7C%7C%7CdateTo=1940-12-31%7C%7C%7Cl-decade=193%7C%7C%7Cl-state=Victoria) in a cloud of disgrace after a murky scandal involving a police superintendent, a gunfight at a wharf, and a coverup of women who should not have been there, so it would seem to fit in the timeline here.


	5. But Where's Asta?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am bringing Peter (and Harriet!) back, but right now I'm having too much fun with classic detectives.

> Mystery-solving, cocktail-swilling couple Nick and Nora Charles first appeared in 1933 in _The Thin Man,_ a magazine novella by Dashiel Hammett (of _The Maltese Falcon_ fame--one of the only mystery novelists to have actually been a detective). He claimed to have based their bantering relationship on his own with long-time lover Lillian Hellman. A film version starring Nick Powell and Myrna Loy followed in 1934, with a script by married duo Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (they also wrote _It’s a Wonderful Life)_. Planned as a low-budget B-movie it became a breakout smash, and was followed by five sequels and a radio serial. According to the novel Nick and Nora were married in 1927, so, accurate timeline!

She had told Jack she was going out, so make an honest woman of herself Phyrne went to find the loudest, liveliest place possible at ten p.m. on a wet Tuesday in February.

Soho's ice-slick cobbled streets, with detritus from the markets limply clogging the drains and only a few huddled figures hurrying home, had the air of a party long over. To Phryne's experienced eye, however, sparks of life would always glow from these basements and attics, to be fed, sheltered, and fanned into flames. The confident click of her own heels was livening her up already, as she threaded her way swiftly through the alleys. 

The doorman at 43 Gerrard was a big shrewd fellow that Phryne had known of old, and she sailed past him after a wink and a quick kiss. A dense haze of cigarette smoke and the comforting blare of jazz wrapped themselves around her as she descended the steps into the hot fug. It seemed somehow much longer than few years since Phryne had been here last. How many nights had she spent here, drinking and dancing and merrily getting arrested, in the raids that had only been part of the fun? Five years ago the place had been jammed with that generation just a little too young for the war, eager to reinvent a radical new world atop that wreckage left by their scarred and guilty elders. Phryne had been a little older and a century wiser than those bright young things, but how she had loved their spirit and energy.

Tonight the 43 was quiet, which was to say, there was only a seven-piece band, a little room to move around on the dance floor, and a crowd three-deep at the bar. Phryne’s eyes swept the room eagerly. Several people called out to her at once, and came barging around, offering drinks and demanding stories. 

"In a moment darlings, but first I'd like a word with the manager. Where's old Katie?"

Unexpectedly somber expressions met her question, and she was silently directed to corner of the bar where a small woman was looking around the room with a piercing air of command. Phryne almost didn’t recognise Kate Meyrick. Her clothes were as chic and flawless as they had always been, but the handsome, clever face looked much more than five years older than the last time Phryne had seen her. Phryne made her way over through the throng. "How's business, Kate?"

"Phryne!" The woman brightened, looking more herself for a moment. "I was wondering when you'd show up, fly-girl. Business isn't bad, you looking to invest again--?" She broke off, and coughed energetically for a minute into a silk handkerchief. 

“Kate, darling, are you alright?" Phryne asked, alarmed, laying a hand on her arm. Kate Meyrick, ever one to stand on her own feet, waved her impatiently away.

"Better than ever, love. Been in the sanitarium for a rest,“ she drawled, a hoarse rasp to her Irish brogue. ” _Inside_ , dearie.”

_“Again?_ ” Phryne took in the woman's haggard face. “Oh, Kate…”

“Fifteen months hard labour. Bribing an officer of the law.” She nodded grimly at Phryne's sharp inhalation. "They let me out early on account of this cough, so I ought to bless the damn thing. The cop got five years--they'll make short work of him in the pen.”

Phryne wrapped an arm around Kate’s shoulders, alarmingly bony under the silk and furs. "Come and sit down for a minute somewhere quiet, Kate, and have a chat." She caught the barman’s eye, and he nodded, a frown creasing for a moment his friendly facade.

“Thanks love, but I've got to keep an eye out just now. The damn busies are still after me every minute." Her black eyes scanned over the room, alert to anyone out of place or suspiciously respectable. “Those kill-joys at Met won’t stop until I turn this place into a lemonade-house for improving lectures.”

The barman slid two tall highballs, with plenty of ice and ginger, down to them along the well-worn bar. Kate caught one easily, the sagged for a moment.  “I don’t know how long I can keep this up, Phryne, and that's the truth.”

“You did us all a world of good, Katie. Soho wouldn’t be Soho without you, but you've earned a real rest.” 

Kate squared her shoulders and smoothed a hand over her perfect bob. “Not me, Phryne, I'll work till I drop. Bagged two Earls for my dear girls, and a Baron for little Dorothy, so that’s one in the eye to the whole lot of them,” she rasped, with great satisfaction, before going off into another fit of coughing. 

“To one in the eye to the kill-joys!” Phryne toasted, fervently, and they both took deep draughts of their drinks. 

“And destruction to all policemen!” Kate crowed, She was waving her glass at the barman for a top-up, so missed Phryne's hesitant sip. “What are you doing, Joe, watering the stuff down in one of my places? You'll cause a scandal.”

It was melancholy to return to the floor, the cheer and noise abruptly transformed into a thin veneer over an ugly world. Phryne sighed and headed for the bar. 

“Now the secret to a dry martini, is it can only be shaken to a waltz beat…” an American voice was drawling. 

“Nick!” Phryne exclaimed, with delight.

Nick Charles, very tall, very slim, and a very good time, was sloping against the bar jawing with the bartender, who looked as if he had just met a friend for life. Most people who talked to Nick felt like that. This usually happened in Los Angeles or Chicago, not London, but Nick Charles could be found in the most unexpected places, provided, of course, there was a drink to be had.

He turned his pleasant heavy-lidded face to look at her, and did his slow, facetious double-take. “Phryne Fisher. As I live and breathe.”

What a stroke of luck! This was exactly the sort she wanted to talk to. Nick Charles, the iconic carefree bachelor. Good old Nick. Nick would never change, the cynical world-weary old sod.

Although, he did look a little unlike himself. “You’re looking prosperous,” Phryne said, taking in the fine-cut suit and healthy glow, where one would expect a seedy seersucker and an alcoholic pallor. “Solve a big case for a grateful sultan or what?”

“Nope, I made my money the old-fashioned way," he smirked. "I married it.”

 _“You?”_ Phryne said, incredulously. “Who’s the mug?”

“I’m the mug.”

A woman in a devastating gown with an ironical tilt to her arched eyebrows leaned over the bar in front of Nick and extended a hand. She had a friendly grin, and Phryne grinned back. 

“Phryne Fisher, meet the biggest mug in three continents.” Nick slid his arm easily around the waist of the svelte brunette. "Nora, the Honourable Phryne Fisher, as they call her over here in the lands of hereditary peerage, she's nothing but trouble."

"Old friend?" Nora asked, innocently. 

"What brings you to Europe?" Phryne smiled and raised a brow at the cocktails. "Or do I need to ask?"

“We came for our honeymoon two years ago, we're still on it." Nora laughed. "We can't seem to get out of here."

"We'll go back Stateside when it's safe for a red-blooded American male." Nick raised his martini and drained it, and waved a hand for another.

“Not to mention a red-blooded American female,” added Nora, following suit.

"And what are you doing with yourself, or do I want to know?" Nick looked Phryne up and down. "Don't worry, you know I won't tell the cops."

"Tell away," Phryne waved for a cocktail of her own. “I’m a private detective now, I have a licence and everything.”

“A flatfoot, huh?” Nick eyed her skeptically. “In heels like that?”

“You see!” Nora cried triumphantly, with a smack on her husband’s arm. “Mr. Charles tells me all the time that a lady has no place in a murder investigation. Why, the dirty tricks he keeps pulling to keep me out of the fun…”

“Now, Mrs. Charles, didn’t I arrange three lovely murders for you on our honeymoon? And yet you still aren’t satisfied.”

“Well, that’s honeymoons for you.” Nora fluttered her lashes expressively.

“Guess I’ll just have to keep trying,” Nick sighed, with a lingering look into his wife's eyes. "Here I was hoping to have a nice long rest on my wife's cash, and she expects me to work day and night keeping her entertained..."

"With cases, darling, cases! You don't want to lose your trim detective's figure."

They sat and laughed and quipped and drank, and the evening floated away on a fizzing ocean of champagne. Life, even when including raids, prisons, murders, and catastrophes, felt like a charming comedy. The band, obliging the mood, swung into a lively waltz.

"Oooh, this one's a lulu!" Nora, bright-eyed, turned to her husband, who slid willingly to his feet. "Phryne, darling, do you mind?" Phryne smiled and waved them on. 

"Aw Nicky, your old friends are the loveliest people..." Nora was saying, as they glided off.

It was a pleasure just to watch them, moving together with a smooth and lively grace. Phryne wondered when that marriage would begin to curdle. It seemed impossible to picture just now. An intense pang of something missing opened up in Phryne's chest. 

What was she doing here? Jack Robinson— _Jack Robinson!—_ had offered himself to her, no commitments, no strings, no looming entrapping future, just as she had always wanted. Why was she wasting one single minute?

NOTES-

_The 43 Club_ — one of the most celebrated/notorious nightclubs of the roaring twenties, in its heyday patronised by gangsters, drug dealers, Bright Young Things and royalty. Owner Kate Meyrick left her doctor husband in 1919 when she was 44 years old with six (or eight? Records differ) children. She answered an advertisement for a share in a ‘tea-house’, which turned out to be a borderline brothel, popular with returning soldiers. She parleyed its success into a string of fashionable clubs, and was jailed three times for flouting licensing laws. Her fourth conviction was for the more serious charge of bribery—she was paying a vice Sergeant an astronomical £100 a week for ‘protection’— and was sentenced to fifteen months hard labour. She really was released in January 1930 on a doctor’s recommendation-"When she walked out of the prison at 8 o’clock there was a wild rush, girls and men swarming round her and cheering loudly". She died in 1933 at 57 having, according to her records, made and lost a fortune of half a million pounds (or about £30 million in today’s terms), and married three of her daughters into the aristocracy. She wound up upstaging Nick and Nora in this chapter which is no mean feat.


	6. Collateral Light

> _While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilisation, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilisation itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions…The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man._ \- G K Chesterton

It had been twenty years since Jack had walked a constable’s beat, but a night like this would always feel friendly to a copper. Chill and damp, with a steady drizzle—-enough to drive the drunks and troublemakers off the streets, but not unpleasant to walk in, if you didn’t pay it too much mind.

His heart was still leaping in his chest. Only minutes ago, gathering his courage to knock on her door, it had felt as if would almost pound out of his ribcage. _Foolish thing,_ he thought. _Like a disobedient dog, that didn’t know it was not wanted._

He couldn’t help but smile a little at it. There was life in the old organ yet. It was feeling returning a limb he had thought completely atrophied, and if Phryne had reopened his capacity for pain, he would still be grateful. He would not shut it out again: with the pain had been resurrected a world of feeling that he had thought dead forever.

_A whole world out there,_ she had said, before turning and bolting away.

“Evening, sir.”

A policeman loomed out of the darkness, rainslicker shining in the lamplight, a big broad fellow who looked like a good type. Jack approved of the suspicious once-over the man gave him—it showed a sound instinct in spotting someone out of place in this expensive neighbourhood—and he automatically touched his hand to his temple, as he might salute one of his own men on the beat.

But here he was not a superior officer. Here he was no one, no one at all, just another civilian, for the moment, in this great city. The constable proceded on, doubtless mentally noting time, place, description, in case an incident should come up.

Jack could have used an oilcloth. He had a long walk, and his old coat was steadily soaking through. He meant to buy a new one here, one of those extravagances meticulously calculated and saved for—a coat, new shoes, a bicycle. He had forgotten to include an umbrella in his plans. Those other extravagances, faintly sketched into a guilty page in his notebook and labelled _Contingencies_ —dinners, dancing, perhaps a good hotel...the row of question marks would still run next to these.

Some part of him had thought that their reunion might have been different. Something other than that smiling indifference, that _putting him in his place_. As if he wasn’t, every minute with her, so wretchedly aware of what his place was! 

_T'were all one, That I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, she is so above me._ He murmured the lines softly to himself. _In her bright radiance and collateral light, must I be comforted, not in her sphere_. 

_All’s Well That Ends_ …well. He knew that this could never have ended well. Optimism, in his hard experience, had killed more men by far than bayonets, and he had brought back from the war a suspicion of wishful thinking ingrained down to his marrow. He tended to expect the worst; and little that had happened to him since ’14 had taught him different. 

But somehow, Phryne had found some still-young part of him that could dream. He had allowed himself to imagine scenes, scenes where she would have run into his arms, both of them laughing or weeping. Scenes where they would fall into a mad passionate embrace, a fire that would burn away every doubt and obstacle. Scenes where they would declare their love, and all the realities that stood between them would simply vanish away.

His steady pace had brought him down Charing Cross. The rain had stopped at last, and a mist was beginning to form. He slowed, irresistibly drawn to an unshuttered window. He never could pass a bookshop without at least looking at the display. A row of second-hand titles promised adventure. _Beau Geste_. _The Mysterious Rider. The Sheik._ Detective stories with strong-jawed men in fedoras, femme fatales with scarlet lips clutching at their lapels. The villain revealed in the final pages, marched off by the police, and all well again. Jack smiled, and walked on.

He had so very nearly done it. He had so very nearly obeyed that command, _come after me, Jack Robinson,_ that impossible demand she had made with a magnanimous smile, as though she were bestowing a favour upon him. Then soared up with a roar, a queen, a Cleopatra, _I am fire and air, my other elements I give to baser life._

Come after me! Him, Jack Robinson, stumbling after her, earthbound, waterlogged, as base an element as a divorced, middle-aged policeman, for God’s sake! He felt more like Bottom farcically entangled with a Titania, than a world-bestriding Anthony fit to play his part in this melodrama. 

Where would it end, in any event? Even his imagination shied away from a dream of a life together. He could foresee only a bleak future of sneaking and lies, of false names in hotel registers and pictures in the tabloids. Already that damnable photograph had brought a stern meeting with the superintendent regarding the reputation of the Force (reputation! Jack had wanted to laugh, and didn’t). Isn’t that the Miss Fisher you swore yourself blind you never laid so much as an improper finger on? No sir, I have not sir _(but I never swore I had no improper thoughts, sir)_. So long as he did not cross that line, Jack would endure all the gossip, all the delighted sneers at the impeccable Robinson brought low at last. But once he crossed that line, the lies would have to start, and his life would become one endless undercover operation. 

In any case, as soon as that line was crossed, the fascination he seemed to hold for her would evaporate. Better to keep it spinning out indefinitely, a perfect dream of what might-have-been. One warmed oneself at her fire, from a reasonable distance. One did not stick one's whole damn head in the flames. 

Oh but that look on her face sometimes! He had really felt, when she had looked up at him with those shining, soft eyes, that this dream might be something real...

_Look at what they do, not what they say. Those are the facts._ George Sanderson had drilled this into him, when he had been his Superintendent. _You’re too damned trusting to be a detective, Jack._

Well, George would know.

Trafalgar Square still looked like the magic-lantern slides he had seen as a boy, Nelson’s column, lions and all, the grey mass of the National Gallery guarding its treasures inside. It had felt utterly unreal the first time he had seen it, on leave in ’16, and it felt unreal now. 

Phryne, Phryne, Phyne. 

What had she actually done, after all? She had turned and bolted, as if her airplane would take off without her, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. _More than anything_ , she had said just the night before that, gazing at him with melting eyes, as he had screwed his courage to the sticking place to make that terrifying leap—only to fall into empty space where he thought she would be waiting for him.  She had abandoned him with all her fleet, and left him to fight his battles alone.

She was no deceiver. She had told him in every possible way that here were no promises. Here, if would taste that fruit, was something brief, ephemeral, an insubstantial pageant, that would melt into thin air. She had beckoned him for a spell into her dream-world, a place that was not subject to the laws of men, or even sometimes to the laws of gravity. If he had pretended that he could belong there, with her princes and film stars and revolutionaries, it was his own damn fault.

He was Jack Robinson, mere mortal, and servant of the law. While she flew off on upon her magical and very expensive wings, for him gravity must eventually re-assert itself. Better it do so before he had too far to fall. 

Still, foolish, he had waited, day after day, for a telegram, for some evidence in black and white. Something, his policeman's habits taught him, on which he could get a conviction. What good was this hearsay? It would never stand up in court. 

Jack walked between the blank faces of the government buildings of Whitehall. The ghostly white Cenotaph loomed up in the mist. He turned away, not wanting to go past it just now, and headed west. 

The Horse-Guards Parade was broad and nearly empty. Ten years ago when he had last been here, it had still been crammed with captured German cannons and guns, gaping crowds, children clambering on the howitzers. The spoils of war, scrap metal to be converted to useful civilian things: ploughshares and fences and traffic signals. The finer stuff to be melted down and made into statues of soldiers, frozen forever in heroic attitudes. 

They had all had their chance, after the war, to build a juster world, on a more solid foundation. Instead they had slept-walked it away, in dreams and nightmares, Jack in a torpor of despair, some on a fever of speculation, borrowing imaginary money for imaginary gains. Now that dream had collapsed. The bill had come due, and it would be a very large bill indeed.

He had worried over the Crash, whether Phryne would be all right. But of course Phryne would be all right. It was nice to see her, triumphant and unscathed, in that elegant flat. No doubt she had spotted some advantage, brilliantly made five out of two and two, and escaped miraculously, like Houdini, from the trap. Someday, he hoped, he could return to that simple joy he had in her existence, without the accompanying agony of wanting to be part of it. 

_She's good, being gone; the hand could pluck her back that shoved her on. I must from this enchanting queen break off: ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,_ m _y idleness doth hatch._

Well, he would have to do better than Anthony. 

Behind him, Big Ben was chiming midnight. Jack stopped until the last toll echoed away, then went west along the river. 

The Thames swirled in its stone embankments, dragged backwards by the tide. Jack stopped to lean for a moment on the balustrade. It astonished him how this massive river could swell and ebb at the pull of the moon. Over twenty feet, someone had told him, all those millions of gallons drawn upwards…

He buried his face in hands, and wept. Then he calmed himself, and went on his way.

At two thirty in the morning, Phryne Fisher, in her best climbing-and-seduction outfit, stared ruefully at the address Jack had left her. She was a woman who would dare almost anything. But even she wouldn’t attempt to break in and steal away a detective from the barracks of Scotland Yard.


End file.
